We’re going to go out on a limb here and suggest that John Woo’s original Face/Off said most of what any reasonable action movie could be expected to say about the technology of Off/Facing, with John Travolta and Nicolas Cage each making respectable contributions to the Ham Sciences in the process. Nevertheless, Paramount has been trying, for fully seven years at this point, to try to get a bit more blood from that particular head-swapping stone, announcing plans for a sequel way back in 2019. Now, though, that in-development planning has hit another snag, with news that announced director Adam Wingard has departed the proposed Face/Off 2.
Per THR, it sounds like Wingard actually quietly vacated the project last year, which means that other directors have been pitching the studio on possible follow-up ideas in the meantime. (Wingard had reportedly written his own script for the movie with Simon Barrett; he was calling the resulting screenplay “really fucking awesome” and “a true sequel to Face/Off” as recently as 2024.) THR reports that Wingard’s break with Paramount on the sequel was apparently mutual. (The The Guest director has mostly been in kaiju mode for the last few years, directing Godzilla Vs. Kong and its 2024 sequel, although his next film is the relatively more grounded Adria Arjona action-thriller Onslaught.)
If we’re being honest, it definitely feels like Paramount is floating in “Sequel just because we own the name” territory, here. On the one hand, there’s nothing to say you couldn’t make another decently fun movie about a cop and criminal swapping faces and living each other’s lives in a world that also has, like, crazy magnet-boot prisons and the like; it’s just that the things that are genuinely appealing about Face/Off have way less to do with the premise, and far more with Woo’s direction and the performances—especially from Cage, who was having a blast letting his more unhinged side out on a big-budget action flick. Even if one of the directors pitching the studio now comes up with a truly great idea, they’ll still have to overcome a problem that seems fundamentally unmanageable, to us: Finding a young actor whose performance can stand up to Cage at his most full-tilt.